On Tuesday and Wednesday, our city will host visitors from Blue Zones, who will be here to help determine whether our community has what it takes to become a Blue Zone city.

What are Blue Zones?

Explorer Dan Buettner traveled the world to find the places where people live the longest and healthiest. In these places, which he named Blue Zones, people routinely live to 100 years of age, while still active and engaged.

Buettner formed a company to share the knowledge and practices of Blue Zones, and these initiatives have spread across more than 40 U.S. cities in nine states.

Blue Zones projects are designed to unite our community behind a common goal: transforming environments so there are more ways to make healthy choices easier.

More places to walk and bike outdoors. More healthy foods. And more purpose. All of which leads to more years to enjoy it all.

The Blue Zones matrix is not a turnkey solution. Their experts work in a diverse array of communities and bring scaffolding upon which we can build our own programming. We Tulsans must lead the way on implementation and operation.

Buettner will provide the event’s keynote address in a public presentation 6 p.m. Tuesday at OU-Tulsa’s Perkins Auditorium at the Learning Center on the Schusterman Campus.

Wednesday there’s an event called “Wine @Five,” which celebrates the social health aspects of Blue Zone communities. In addition, you’ll have the opportunity to meet Blue Zones personnel and many of our community stakeholders, ask questions, and share ideas. That event will take place at 5 p.m. at TCC’s Center for Creativity.

We hear all the time about how dismal our health outcomes are in Oklahoma. More people smoke, are overweight, and suffer from diabetes, mental illness and cardiovascular diseases than national averages.

We are near the bottom in terms of life expectancy, health promoting behaviors and access to health care. Nationally, our model of health care has emphasized the dousing of fires (“rescue care”) rather than fire prevention.

When I talk to patients, I boil down prevention to a few simple precepts that are easy to say but harder to do. Regular practice turns them into healthy behaviors. They are:

Get enough sleep.

Move your body throughout the day.

Eat well — a healthy assortment of foods. Mostly plants, and not too much.

Interact socially. Isolation is not good for the body, soul or mind.

Take some time to reflect on what you are grateful for.

These behaviors are practiced in Blue Zones across the world. They are not unique to those areas, and they can be more easily achieved here in Tulsa.

If finding a way to make life healthier as a core value speaks to you, then come learn about Blue Zones.

In addition to the two public events I mentioned earlier, there will be several theme-based focus groups taking place throughout the region on June 27. You can learn more about these at go.bluezonesproject.com/tulsa.

This week’s Blue Zones visit to Tulsa did not happen by chance. Many partners have been involved in bringing the site visit to life — including Mayor G.T. Bynum’s Office, the Tulsa Regional Chamber and the Tulsa Health Department. Local businesses, nonprofits, foundations and educational institutions have contributed time, talent and money to bring Blue Zones to Tulsa.

Here’s hoping that Tulsans can live healthier and longer and keep our city on a roll.

Dr. John Henning Schumann is president of the University of Oklahoma — Tulsa.

The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) has slowly become more popular as Americans discover that the law has lowered the number of people without health insurance and provided baseline benefits to millions of us (preventive care, youth coverage under parents until age 26, doing away with pre-existing conditions, etc.), without causing massive social or health care disruption.

Critics of the ACA cite ideals like letting the marketplace sort things out, rather than relying on government intervention to do so. Of course, the individual mandate, the requirement to be insured, was scaled back by the late 2017 tax reform law–such that people on the individual insurance market will be able to opt out in 2018 and beyond if they choose without penalty (even though the US Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the mandate is constitutional).

Recently, a reader sent me a fascinating article about why some evangelical Christians also dislike Obamacare. It’s known as crucicentrism.

Not all evangelicals hold this worldview. According to a source cited in the article, about one quarter of evangelicals espouse this viewpoint.

Still–what does it mean? From the aforementioned article:

To secure a permanent place at God’s side is far more important than any short-lived torment to the body. From this perspective, then, the greatest kindness one can show others is to help them reach the salvation of the Cross.

Such a crucicentrist view on compassion explains puzzling statements by white evangelicals like Mark Green, a Tennessee state senator. “Sickness,” Green told a church group, “is one of the main avenues that bring people to religion.” In the Gospels, he said, “every person who came to Christ came to Christ with a physical need. It was either hunger or a disease.” When the government created the ACA it did a “great injustice” because, Green explained, by helping people regain their health, it had limited “the Christian church’s role” and robbed sick individuals of the opportunity “to come to a saving knowledge of who God is.” People who fell ill would now look “to the government” instead of to God.

In this worldview, suffering is seen as a pathway to faith, which will lead to salvation. And, I presume, better health.

Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. After all, institutions have always needed members, missions, and money to maintain their existence over millennia.

The United Kingdom has appointed a Minister of Loneliness, according to several news reports this month.

In announcing the appointment, British Prime Minister Theresa May said

I want to confront this challenge for our society and for all of us to take action to address the loneliness endured by the elderly, by carers, by those who have lost loved ones — people who have no one to talk to or share their thoughts and experiences with,

As more people live longer than ever, loneliness is compounded by physical infirmities that make social interactions difficult.

As a doctor, I consider loneliness a genuine risk to good health, even if the title of said minister reminded me of Monty Python’s famed “Ministry of Silly Walks.” (Apparently, I was not alone in this thought.)

“How can you expect patients to look after their health, when they don’t know where they will be living next week? You can not separate people’s physical health from their psychological, social and spiritual health.”

So asked community health nurse Ruth Chorley, in an article by Rachel Pugh in the Guardian.

The story reported on a local program in Oldham, one of the UK’s National Health Service districts, in which nurse specialists work to help people whose social and economic problems prevent them from managing their health.

Chorley is a focused care practitioner – one of four employed by Hope Citadel Healthcare, a not-for-profit community interest company, to lead a pioneering approach to delivering healthcare to the most needy families in its four Greater Manchester NHS GP practices, by filling in the gaps between health and social care.

I think this small scale NHS experiment is one right way to truly improve a community’s health.

Artist’s rendering of Central Library. It turned out as good as it looks.

In Tulsa the flagship downtown Central Library just re-opened after a three-year renovation.

It’s been spectacularly re-designed and updated with all of the latest library technology. It includes the nation’s only (to this point) embedded Starbucks Coffee–a plus or minus depending on your viewpoint. (Some academic libraries at universities already contain them.)

A recent newspaper article profiled another important feature of the Tulsa library: A full-time social worker.

As you may or may not know, depending on where you live and how much you use your public library, urban libraries are often visited by people in transition–those that are jobless, homeless, and who frequently have stable or unstable mental illness.

After all–libraries are free, have resources, generally have available computer time and tutorials, and kind librarians who can help with requests.

Many libraries now have social workers and other representatives of social service agencies that can help with issues like finding places to live, regular sources of food, and employment options.

I was glad to read about Deborah Hunter in Tulsa. Her story is all the more poignant because she’s driven by the fact that her own daughter was diagnosed with schizophrenia–a challenge that propelled her to get a professional degree.

I love our new library, and I’m glad that the library and Tulsa’s Family and Children’s Services are doing what they can to offer help to those in need.